[D] Discussing the Siege Tank - Page 7

On December 23 2011 10:31 Willzzz wrote:
The other problem with biomech, is that it makes your whole army as slow as the tanks. This negates the primary advantage of the bio army in TvP, mobility is the key to defeating the protoss army.

Do you really have much luck sniping colossus? I mean it takes 7 tanks to 1 shot a collosus, assuming at least +1. Does that not give the rest of the colossus too much time to deal damage?

Vikings work because you can snipe one and then kite back, you can't kite back with tanks..

On December 23 2011 09:38 attwell wrote:
Pretty sure this was or has devolved into a balance thread, which probably should be in battle.net forums.

On December 23 2011 10:56 Tactical_Tim wrote:


This is definitely true, but I think I like tanks (at least late game) much more, as I feel they give my army much more "staying power" in a sense. When I go straight bio+viking, I tend to be doing more of the running. However, having tanks in my army, in my opinion, forces the protoss to be much more careful how they engage, otherwise they could lose an entire army very quickly. I find that their deathball evaporates much faster than mine does, due to the added splash of tanks (as long as you target fire correctly on unit clusters/colossus) in conjunction with the raw power of stimmed bio. Furthermore, I think Bio + Tank discourages HT, which I find to be the most difficult to deal with. You can make vikings if you'd like, but personally I'd rather just have more tanks or marauders.

Also, I don't find the loss of mobility to be that much of a problem because you still have medivacs and bio, so drops are still do-able. In fact, you can do some fun stuff like dropping a third, and when they move over to address it, move your main force between the third and natural and siege up. As long as you're mindful of flanks and play cautiously, I think biomech is pretty strong.

In the end it's all personal preference/playstyle, IMO.

On December 23 2011 19:26 Zarahtra wrote:

The main thing is that with bio you should *never* fight the main army heads on. If you are, your opponent likely hasn't been teching/playing correctly(assuming you haven't done crippling drops), because just simply with chargelots he can run over you if you don't kite via rauders.

If you do kite with rauders, the tanks will just die after you've stuttered twice or so and will not have been cost effective. You can still do your drops with medivacs, but tanks will be cutting into rauder, medivac, viking and/or ghost production. Will they make your main army beefier? I suppose, but you are kind of going middle of the road of "I will not engage your army heads on" and "I can take you heads on" which comes out at "I can almost take you heads on". More importantly, when you are actually going to take the opponent heads on, you don't really want to have a drop out there, since every supply matters. For bio it's fine if you are dropping and stutterstepping away from the main force, since you aren't really engaging the ball and after you've got x many units, more units stutter stepping doesn't really help that much.

On December 23 2011 20:13 Big J wrote:
And Terrans play this style all the time vs Zerg with the exact situation you described (can't fight baneling/zergling head on with marines, if kited backwards the tanks will be exposed to ling/muta) and "somehow" make it work, so it might work vs Protoss as well.
Also it comes down A LOT to positioning if you are able to fight "heads on" or not, with bio alone and with tank/bio as well/even more.

On December 23 2011 21:28 PaleBlueDot wrote:


There is a huge difference here. In TvZ, marines are kited back so that banelings kill the least amount possible, allowing marines to actually get a head on fight with just the zergling/muta remains. Tanks are used incredibly specifically to snipe baneling numbers. If the tanks kill the banelings, no terran is going to complain that they died, because they ensured victory for that fight. This is directly opposed to TvP where there is nothing with few enough hitpoints to "snipe" without 6-7+ tanks, and thats quite an investment to just lose after what might be only one volley killing one colossus. Once tank numbers start reaching 6-7 then they are becoming a big component of the army, not the 3-4 tanks usually seen in TvZ that are just used to snipe banelings.

On December 23 2011 22:05 Big J wrote:
Low numbers like 3-4 tanks are exclusivly used in some form of 2base Tank/Marine all-in in ZvT. For any form of stable macro compositions every terran builds way more than those.
Furthermore:
if you have 6-7 tanks, you also need only one volley to kill a colossus AND everything under it, while the unit doesn't become useless after the colossi are down.
if you have 3-4 tanks, you can just snipe templar and sentries all day long.
Also another comparison: you don't build tanks vs roaches to "snipe" them, but they are straight up good when they target them, just like against stalkers and partially against colossi.

Imo the situation is not so different as long as you shift queue the tanks attack commands on the right units.(even though that wasn't even my original argument, which was as simple as: "Zarahtra's argumentation is wrong because his argument implies that siege tanks are useless in TvZ against ling/bling/muta"

On December 22 2011 05:27 Chaosvuistje wrote:
All these passive perks that Protoss has are just boring compared to for example, Blink. If Charge wasn't an autocast ability it would already be far more interresting decisionwise. And if they nerfed the Immortals hardened shields to deflect up to 20 instead of 10 passively, and give it an active ability to reduce the damage to 5 for 0.5 seconds on a 2 second cooldown would already massively increase the fun in microing Protoss when moving through a tank like and increase the watchability.

It isn't so much as the Tank being bad against Protoss. Its about the Protoss race being designed to plow through tank lines unit for unit bar the Sentry and unblink Stalkers.

On December 23 2011 22:05 Big J wrote:


Low numbers like 3-4 tanks are exclusivly used in some form of 2base Tank/Marine all-in in ZvT. For any form of stable macro compositions every terran builds way more than those.
Furthermore:
if you have 6-7 tanks, you also need only one volley to kill a colossus AND everything under it, while the unit doesn't become useless after the colossi are down.
if you have 3-4 tanks, you can just snipe templar and sentries all day long.
Also another comparison: you don't build tanks vs roaches to "snipe" them, but they are straight up good when they target them, just like against stalkers and partially against colossi.

Imo the situation is not so different as long as you shift queue the tanks attack commands on the right units.(even though that wasn't even my original argument, which was as simple as: "Zarahtra's argumentation is wrong because his argument implies that siege tanks are useless in TvZ against ling/bling/muta"

On December 24 2011 00:53 avilo wrote:
I dun think a lot of people understand. Brood war tanks were good because they did the same amount of damage to all units. It was 75 iirc? There was none of this hard counter non-sense where suddenly your entire army became obsolete because your opponent built 3 "counter units."

Can you imagine having a siege tank vulture army and your opponent built 3 reavers and suddenly you are auto-raped? Well, that is how SC2 is in TvP - you build siege tank + hellions and the opponent build like 4 immortals suddenly you're army is worthless in comparison.

But now imagine you can build mass of almost any protoss unit to make siege tanks worthless...that's SC2. Every protoss unit counters the tank, and the tank is given no chance to counter other units because they mistakingly changed it to make it a specific counter to "armored." So instead of actually being able to kill stuff like zealots and blink stalkers when you already have a pre-sieged army, the opponent instead 1A's into you without thought and comes out ahead.

In beta, and when tanks had damage strong to all, and they didn't stupidly change zealot armor type to make it easy mode versus mech, tanks could actually kill stuff before they closed in.

What happened was a certain balance designer got very afraid when he started to see mech was completely viable, especially with ghosts, so he pre-emptively nerfed it before it even had a chance to be used and pre-emptively before everyone actually learned how to play SC2.

Tanks with beta damage vs protoss would actually be fine right now, mainly because the overall skill level of protoss has gone waaaaaaay up since that time, when all protoss knew how to do was 1A collosus. It took a year for protoss to use warp prisms, just wrap your heads around that guys. An entire year (ok except white-ra cause he was smart) for warp prisms to be seen as "useful."

It just seems to me like every time mech has ever shown viability they immediately nerfed it into the ground asap. The series of MC vs thorzain got thors nerfed right after that series...a knee jerk balance design reaction...and that reaction has always happened with MECH. It took MONTHS for infestors to even be considered needing a nerf when people were making 40 a game lol.

I just thought i'd add this to the "siege tank" discussion, because they were in fact viable over a year ago, but blizzard purposely changed it so they weren't because of some irrational fear that SC2 would...become like brood war...the greatest game ever...pretty crazy i know.

I wrote a guide about ghostmech in beta, and i'm completely convinced it would have been very standard in macro games by now if mech hadn't been gimped patch after patch. Instead, we're all currently stuck with the marauder.